It is known to use mission planning processes, or task planning processes, to determine tasks for entities such as vehicles to perform.
Many mission planning problems have complex and nonlinear constraints. Communication constraints are an example of such complex and nonlinear constraints.
Conventionally, when attempting to solve mission planning problems with complex and nonlinear constraints, either the nonlinear constraints are approximated with simpler linear constraints, or the size of the planning problem is reduced, for example, by using a receding horizon approach.
H. Nguyen, N. Pezeshkian, M. Raymond, A. Gupta, J. Spector, “Autonomous Communication Relays for Tactical Robots”, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, 2003, discloses a system of ground robots, where specialist relay robots form a convoy together with a master robot. The relay robots take a fixed position when a rule-based system indicates that a relay is required for line-of-sight maintenance.
R. Beard, T. McLain, “Multiple UAV Cooperative Search under Collision Avoidance and Limited Range Communication constraints”, 2003 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2003, discloses reducing the size of a planning problem by approximating communication constraints using a simple range constraint between vehicles.
T. Schouwenaars, A. Stubbs, J. Paduano, E. Feron, “Multivehicle path planning for nonline-of-sight communication”, Journal of Field Robotics, Vol. 23, Issue 3-4, pp. 269-290, 2006, discloses a mixed integer linear programming approach to constrain a path planning problem for a group of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). In this approach only a short part of the mission is planned at a time. Also, the complexity of line-of-sight blocking obstacles that can be modelled is limited.
S. Ponda, O. Huber, H. Choi, J. How, “Avoid communication outages in decentralized planning”, IEEE Globecom 2010 Workshop on Wireless Networking for UAVs, 2010, discloses a distributed planning system that tends to require strong communication connectivity between vehicles. In this approach, communication constraints are modelled as simple distance constraints. Also, with this approach, the use of specialist communication planning tools tends to be difficult.